Enlarge / Users can install Homebrew via the Terminal in macOS. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Popular Mac tool Homebrew has long been used by developers and others for package management on macOS, but as we lamented in our first M1 Mac review, it didn't support Apple Silicon when Apple's new Macs first launched late last year. Now, with the release of Homebrew 3.0.0, that's no longer the case: Homebrew now supports Apple Silicon natively, albeit not with every package.

The volunteer Homebrew team made the announcement on the Homebrew blog alongside today's release. While the native support is not yet comprehensive, it bridges the gap significantly, and users can still run Terminal via Rosetta 2 to do what they can't yet while running natively on Apple Silicon. The Homebrew blog post says "we welcome your help" in providing bottles for all packages moving forward.

Here's the full bullet point on Apple Silicon in the Homebrew 3.0.0 release notes:

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  2015 13-inch i7-powered MacBook Air at left, 2020 13-inch M1-powered MacBook Air at right. [credit: Lee Hutchinson ]

Citing sources close to Apple, a new report in Bloomberg outlines Apple's roadmap for moving the entire Mac lineup to the company's own, custom-designed silicon, including both planned released windows for specific products and estimations as to how many performance CPU cores those products will have.

The M1, which has four performance cores (alongside four efficiency cores), launched this fall in the company's lowest-end computers—namely, the MacBook Air and comparatively low-cost variants of the Mac mini and 13-inch MacBook Pro. These machines have less memory and fewer ports than the company's more expensive devices. The Macs with more memory or ports, such as the 16-inch MacBook Pro, are still sold with Intel CPUs.

According to the report's sources, Apple plans to release new, Apple Silicon-based versions of 16-inch MacBook Pro and the higher end 13-inch MacBook Pro configurations in 2021, with the first chips appropriate for at least some of these computers arriving as early as the spring, and likely all of them by the fall. New iMac models that share CPU configurations with high-end MacBook Pros are also expected next year.

Enlarge / Hey, my macro lens still works! (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

The new M1-powered MacBook Air is hilariously fast, and the battery lasts a long-ass time.

If you stop reading this review immediately after this, then know that unless Windows virtualization is a requirement of your workflow, you should probably just go ahead and sell your old MacBook Air immediately and get this thing instead.

Assuming you've got a grand or so lying around that you weren't going to spend on something else. But hey, if you do, then I can confidently tell you that in spite of what a legion of Doubting Thomases (including me!) might have said about Apple's freshman effort at its own PC silicon, it is now my studied opinion that there are far, far stupider ways to part with your cash.

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  The 2020, M1-equipped Mac mini. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Apple is crazy, right? The Mac just had its best year of sales ever, and Cupertino is hitting the platform with a shock like it hasn’t had in nearly 15 years—back in a time when the Mac was not having such a good year. Apple is beginning the process of replacing industry-standard Intel chips with its own, custom-designed silicon.

In a way, we're not just reviewing the new Mac mini—a Mac mini is always a Mac mini, right? We're reviewing an ARM-based Mac for the first time. And this is not exactly the same story as all the other ARM machines we've looked at before, like Windows 10 on ARM—a respectable option with some serious tradeoffs.

Sure, longer battery life and quick waking from sleep are already out there on other ARM computers. But as you may have seen in our hands-on earlier this week , what we're encountering here is also a performance leap—and as you'll also see in this review, a remarkable success at making this new architecture compatible with a large library of what could now, suddenly, be called legacy Mac software.

Enlarge / The splash image for Apple's (probably) final event of 2020.

At 10:00am Pacific time (1pm Eastern) on Tuesday, November 10, Apple will hold yet another live event—the third in as many months—to announce new products. This time, the company is expected to reveal the first Macs that will replace Intel processors with Apple Silicon, the company's in-house-designed ARM-based chips.

As with the prior two events, we'll be liveblogging the proceedings right here. Just return to this page before the show starts to see all the updates from Cupertino.

The previous two events announced two new Apple Watch models, a new iPad, and four new iPhones, among other things. But the tagline for this event is "one more thing," suggesting the focus will singularly be on Apple's long-rumored, recently confirmed ARM transition.

Enlarge / The promotional key art graphic Apple sent out with its announcement about its October 13, 2020, product launch event. (credit: Apple )

Here we are again , less than one month after Apple's September 15 event. Next Tuesday, October 13, Apple representatives will take to the streaming stage to announce new products in an event the company has monikered "Hi, Speed." But what can we expect from the event?

Normally, Apple launches iPhones at a September event, but it didn't this year, possibly because of COVID -related delays in its testing of the new devices. Rather, the September event was primarily about the Apple Watch (there was also a new, redesigned iPad Air , along with some services announcements and a slightly modified non-Air, non-Pro, non-mini iPad).

All that is to say that iPhones are very likely to be the stars of Apple's October show. Let's get into what to expect from them—and what else we might see at the event.